Word: lipson
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...look a little closer at the work of researchers Hod Lipson and Jordan Pollack, you'd see their robot creation isn't ready yet to rule the universe. Even compared with other robots, it's primitive: using only four basic parts--plastic cylinders and ball joints, simple circuitry and small motors, along with rules for friction and gravity--it designed little self-propelled crawlers, like the toddler's insect...
Other scientists have created similar robots in their computers, to say nothing of systems intelligent enough to play championship chess, but Pollack and Lipson took a giant step out of the virtual world. After they hooked their computer to a $50,000 commercial plastic model-making machine, it produced actual offspring, not just a model on a computer screen. The only human intervention was installing the robot's little motor and computer-programmed microchip ("neurons...
...their report in Nature, Lipson and Pollack admit their "primitive replicating robot" is far from the mythical medieval humanoid, or golem (after whom they've named their project). For one thing, it doesn't actually replicate--it can't make robots that make new robots--nor does it learn from its environment. But, as Rodney Brooks of the M.I.T. Artificial Intelligence Lab points out, it's a "long-awaited and necessary step" to creating machines that are truly lifelike...
...sheer non-fiction of the scene in the lab of Drs. Jordan B. Pollack and Hod Lipson at Brandeis gives one a metaphysical chill. Their primitive little creature, offspring of their robot, has one ability only: It crawls. Dr. Lipson tells the New York Times that the robot "walks something like a crab. It looks like it's crawling on the floor." This sounds eerily familiar...